Ayatollah Khamenei is doing everything in his power, through extreme demands, to quash the Iran nuclear deal, which has a deadline of tomorrow night. The question: Will Obama cave anyway? Perhaps Khamenei should ask for everything the U.S. gives Israel, including its own Iron Dome system. Obama would likely do it.

In the latest mullah bait-and-switch, the Iranians are now, at the last minute, refusing to give up their enriched uranium stockpile. Don’t believe it? Well, it’s being reported by Obama’s best loyalists, the New York Times:

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — With a negotiating deadline just two days away, Iranian officials on Sunday backed away from a critical element of a proposed nuclear agreement, saying they are no longer willing to ship their atomic fuel out of the country.

For months, Iran tentatively agreed that it would send a large portion of its stockpile of uranium to Russia, where it would not be accessible for use in any future weapons program. But on Sunday Iran’s deputy foreign minister made a surprise comment to Iranian reporters, ruling out an agreement that involved giving up a stockpile that Iran has spent years and billions of dollars to amass.

“The export of stocks of enriched uranium is not in our program, and we do not intend sending them abroad,” the official, Abbas Araqchi, told the Iranian media, according to Agence France-Presse. “There is no question of sending the stocks abroad.”

Western officials confirmed that Iran was balking at shipping the fuel out, but insisted that there were other ways of dealing with the material. Chief among those options, they said, was blending it into a more diluted form.

Depending on the technical details, that could make the process of enriching it for military use far more lengthy, or perhaps nearly impossible.

Nonetheless, the revelation that Iran is now insisting on retaining the fuel could raise a potential obstacle at a critical time in the talks. And for critics of the emerging deal in Congress, in Israel and in Sunni Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, the prospect of leaving large amounts of nuclear fuel in Iran, in any form, is bound to intensify their already substantial political opposition.

You have to hand it to the ayatollah. He has played the American team to a fare-thee-well.

But can the Americans be that stupid? Yes, they can. Desperation for a deal turns you into a moron. All this talk of “blending” and “dilution” is absolutely absurd, and even the NYT is saying the administration is doing damage control. As Omri Ceren puts it in his invaluable newsletter from the negotiations:

Either way — downblending or oxidation — makes it difficult to see how the parties could stretch Iran’s breakout time to a year. Combine this new position with the Iranians’ demand to keep their fortified underground enrichment bunker at Fordow open, and the administration’s sales pitch on the Hill becomes that much harder.

I’ll say. For a member of Congress to sign on to this deal, he or she would have to be either a complete nincompoop or a total administration prostitute — most likely both. Those, like Michael Ledeen, who predicted the Iranian leadership didn’t want a deal in the first place and the entire negotiations were a charade are looking better and better.

In the roughly ten years since I helped found PJ Media, I have been back and forth between LA and DC a fair amount of times. I am on a plane at this moment, returning to my California home once again, but never have I been more disturbed by my trip. Our nation’s capital has become strange, surreal and disquieting. It’s hard to have a lot of hope.

Long gone, thankfully, are the endless booths selling Obamabilia. But replacing that falsely optimistic atmosphere is an empty, bleak feeling. Yes, Washington is still the capital of posh, with celebrity chefs aplenty and ever-escalating real estate, the money having drained from the rest of the country down to Foggy Bottom, but nobody seems to be having much fun from it anymore, not even the Democrats.

Obama and his minions are huddled wherever they’re huddled, busy destroying the Western World with their bizarre policies and eagerness to make a deal with Iran that is so desperate it makes the word pathetic seem pathetic. The results of this desperation have been wretched, a fascistic new Persian Empire emerging from Libya to Yemen with Obama auditioning for the role of Cyrus the Great – or is it Ahmadinejad Junior? Whatever the case, it’s horrible Even those same Democrats know it. They’re embarrassed – and they should be. But for the most part they don’t have the guts to say anything. This is the kind of administration that exchanges a creepy sociopath like Bergdahl for five Islamic homicidal maniacs and expects praise for being humanitarian. And everyone walks away shaking their heads.

It’s hard to know why Obama is doing it all. I know it sounds like a rude overstatement but in a way he reminds me of that crazy German pilot flying that plane into that alpine cliff, only the plane is us (America and the West). Does he hate us all that much – or is it just Netanyahu? Whatever the explanation, it’s mighty peculiar. At this point almost no one in the Congress appears to be backing him up – and yet he continues. Who knows what will happen next?

Saturday I had the pleasure of again attending the Claremont Institute’s annual Winston Churchill Dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, one of the more impressive conservative events on the West Coast. It seemed more crowded than usual. The line to be photographed with this year’s honoree was longer even than the very long one for the last year’s winner, Senator Ted Cruz, stretching this time almost out the door of the hotel onto the gilded streets of Beverly Hills. The person being honored must be popular indeed. And he was. It was Charles Krauthammer, the man many regard as America’s premiere conservative intellectual.

The group I was with grinned at the sight and almost spontaneously said to each other: “Why not Krauthammer for president?” And why not? He probably knows the issues better than any possible candidate on either side of the aisle and could discuss them more coherently. And when it comes to a life story, does anyone contemplating running for president have one even roughly the equal of Krauthammer’s? In 1971, just returned from studying politics at Oxford and about to enter Harvard Medical School, he had a diving board accident that put him in the hospital for fourteen months and left him paralyzed for life. And yet he was able to graduate from Harvard Med with his class and become a psychiatrist. (He now describes himself as a “psychiatrist in remission… doing very well, thank you.”) Soon enough, however, he branched into politics and became a speech writer for Walter Mondale. (His wry explanation: ”I was young.”) Eventually he become the conservative columnist, best-selling author and Fox News fixture we all know.

But could such a person — a pundit, even — plausibly be president? Although he wouldn’t be the first POTUS in a wheelchair, it sounds absurd. But the Founders did not intend our country to be governed by lifetime politicians, as it has been. And what were Madison, Hamilton and John Jay in the first place when they wrote the Federalist Papers? Basically, pundits. Why not Krauthammer? A flurry of excitement has recently built around Dr. Ben Carson as a candidate from outside but some have said he is not ready on the issues. That would never be a problem for Charles. And would you rather have Charles Krauthammer or Donald Trump? Get serious.

Nevertheless, I admit, it’s a long, long shot. Still, listening to Krauthammer’s witty, riveting address at the Claremont Institute, I wish it wasn’t. Sometimes I wish we lived in a different world — like Seneca’s Rome — where the brightest of our society were involved in our politics instead of the consistently middlebrow bores we currently have that make us think not at all. It’s embarrassing, really. That people actually believe Barack Obama is a good public speaker makes the head spin.

But more important at this moment was the content of Krauthammer’s speech. He pointed out that as bad as Obama’s domestic policies have been, they can be corrected, some of them almost instantly, by a Republican president. The foreign policy catastrophe we are experiencing is a wholly different matter. It will take decades to correct this, Obama having left the world without American leadership and in a horrifying state of entropy. Because of this expanding global disaster Krauthammer believes the coming election will focus more on foreign policy than it has in some time. Needless to say, he didn’t propose himself as a candidate, but he did comment on some of the others. (“Bush should change his name.”) He liked Scott Walker, but at the moment appeared to be leaning toward Marco Rubio, citing the Florida senator’s impassioned speech about the Middle East last week. It was clear, however, that winning the election was everything.

(Thanks to Prof. Scott Soames of USC for suggesting this post and to Katherine and Frank Price for once more hosting Sheryl and me at the Claremont dinner.)

Imagine if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2016. What would it actually be like?

Roughly forty percent of the country will consider the incoming first-term president an extreme serial liar with a sense of entitlement the size of Australia. Another forty percent will think, yes, she may be dishonest, but all politicians are and we support her anyway. The middle twenty percent will be some muddle of the previous two views.

And this is before she is even inaugurated. And unlike with Obama, she will not ride the crest of being the first black (or mixed race) president. The whole “first woman” thing reeks of moral narcissism and grandiosity. Israel had its first woman prime minister decades ago (Golda Meir, 1969) as did the UK (Margaret Thatcher, 1979). Even benighted Pakistan elected Benazir Bhutto in 1988. It’s no big thing. In fact, the idea of electing Clinton because she is a woman is both sexist and insulting.

Yet that is undoubtedly the only reason that she would win.

What a monumentally depressing way to come into office in a country that is already divided as never in our time. The idea that Clinton could bring us together is not only illogical, it’s absurd. ”Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”? How about national hari-kari? How would this person begin to unravel the monstrous global situation left to her by Obama? It’s virtually impossible to comprehend.

And then her presidency begins. What if something untoward happens, if, for example, more information appears about the involvement of her husband and the unconscionable Jeffrey Epstein, purveyor of underage girls? The national distraction would be huge and endless. Meanwhile, the Islamic State and its seemingly endless avatars will be functioning (how could it be otherwise?) and Iran (nonsensical deal signed or not) will be plotting how to expand its empire into Europe and South America while building its nuclear arsenal. Who knows what the Russians and the Chinese will be up to?

Western civilization? Forget it. We’ll be lost in endless cable news soap operas as described by Geraldo Rivera. And that will be the best of it.

Worth noting, too, is that by the time Hillary is in office we will have been subjected to a prodigious amount of rehashing of scandals, many of which we don’t know about yet. Some of those will have vast character implications, like the terror attack on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya. From what we already know of that scandal, Hillary and Obama were well aware within hours that this was an attack by al-Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Islam and not caused by some amateurish video virtually no one saw. Still, Clinton assured Charles Woods — father of murdered Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods — only a couple of days later that they would “arrest” and “prosecute” the man responsible who made that video. She did this at Woods’ son’s own funeral. What kind of human being actually does something like that?

I don’t know anybody personally who would, at least I hope I don’t. And I certainly hope that kind of person wouldn’t be president of the United States.

So as one who once was a Democrat, I implore the Democratic Party to do anything possible to avoid nominating Hillary Clinton. I say this not as someone who is desperate to see a Republican elected, although I would definitely prefer that. I say this first as an American concerned for our culture and civilization, no matter what party is in power. A Hillary Clinton presidency would place that in serious jeopardy. It may already be too late.

Why has Barack Obama been reluctant to congratulate Bibi Netanyahu for his surprising and smashing electoral victory in this week’s Israeli elections, aside from the obvious childish personal enmity?

It couldn’t be more obvious. Obama — never a gracious man — is seeing the bad handwriting on the wall. Israel, like America, has a “silent majority” and they have stood up tall in opposition to so-called liberalism/progressivism and defeatism against Islamic terror. That same “silent majority” is very likely to stand up again in this country in 2016 for similar reasons. They already did in 2014 — and they could go further, unraveling all of Obama’s policies and destroying his legacy.

The astonishing size of the Likud victory — the party was predicted in polls to lose by 3-4 Knesset seats and ended up winning by 5-6 — suggests the “silent majority” phenomenon of people quietly becoming fed up with being force-fed by liberal elites. If you read mainstream media coverage today, you see those same media having quasi-nervous breakdowns. Suddenly they are disenchanted with democracy.

And this all happened despite Obama’s get-out-the-vote henchmen being sent over to Israel — with a yet unclear degree of administration backing — to support the Zionist Union (i. e. Labor Party) opposition to Likud with all their modern electoral techniques that were so successful in 2012. This makes their failure all the more glaring — and disturbing to the administration.

Another loser in all this is Obama’s Iran deal, assuming that would ever happen anyway. It makes the 47 senators who sent an open letter to Khamenei seem more than ever the deliverers of simple truth.

As for all the brouhaha about a Palestinian state — Bibi apparently pledged no Pal state in the final days of the election — this is irrelevant. As of now, and as of the last 25 or so years since the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians have shown no real interest in a two-state solution, other than for propaganda purposes. When discussions get serious, they always run for the proverbial hills. The idea that Obama and Kerry are going to solve this in 20 months of their administration is somewhere south of silly.

This election is good news. Time for the GOP to redouble their efforts for 2016.

I cannot tell a lie. I stole Hillary’s emails. Well, not all of them, about 14,000. That’s all I could fit on my already-clogged hard drive. But I ordered a new three terabyte baby from Amazon that should be here tomorrow since I have Prime — so I’ll be back for more.

Now I know my reputation is as a writer and not a hacker or even a techie, so I owe you an explanation for how I did it — otherwise you won’t believe me. To be honest, I got a little help from Fox’s James Rosen, who wrote Thursday:

… with the aid of software named Maltego, experts had established that the [Clinton] server is up and running, receiving connectivity to the Internet through an Atlanta-based firm called Internap Network Services Corporation….

Now, working with publicly available tools that map network connectivity, experts have established that the last “hop” before the mail server’s Internet Protocol, or IP, address (listed as 64.94.172.146) is Internap’s aggregator in Manhattan (listed as 216.52.95.10).

A lot of technical bla-bla, then Rosen cuts to the chase:

Perhaps most concerning, private analysts determined that clintonemail.com has been running an older model of Microsoft Internet Information Services, or IIS – specifically version 7.5, which has been documented to leave users exposed on multiple fronts. The website CVEDetails.com, which bills itself as “the ultimate security vulnerability datasource,” is awash with descriptions of serious security vulnerabilities associated with version 7.5, including “memory corruption,” “password disclosure vulnerability,” and the enabling of “remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service.”

Old Microsoft software? Exposed on multiple fronts? Password vulnerability?… This was the server of the secretary of state??? It sounded like an average Chinese third grader could crack it!

But wait… didn’t that mean I….?

Well, what do you know? I knew I didn’t take that YouTube course in cobol for nothing. Out they came, all 14,000 emails. I haven’t even gone through a tenth of them yet, but I promise you one thing, I’m no sucker. No one gets my stash for nothing. Not with today’s erratic stock market. But… just because I’m a nice guy… I will share a few with you. Some are personal, some political. Some personal and political. You be the judge.

TO: POTUS

FROM: STATE

SUBJECT: CONTRACT

Barack, I thought we agreed that if Bill spoke at your nomination you weren't going to do anything to hurt my future. I already told the SEAL's father at the funeral we were going to get the guy who made that ridiculous video and he didn't believe me for a second. With all due respect, get someone else to tell that cockamamie story on the Sunday shows. What's a National Security Adviser for anyway?

Please tell your mother I'm so sorry about what happened to Morsi. You know I'm behind the MB all the way. People are so unfair to fundamentalists. PS: Love the new dress. And don't worry about Anthony. So what if he's not mayor of NY? You won't have to go to all those dreadful functions and you'll have more time. [emoticon missing]

I know you don’t read or write emails (so you say) but I have no choice – this time it’s over. You promised me you would never come within a hundred miles of Jeffrey Epstein and his…. [the rest got garbled in the feed. Not even Maltego software is perfect. Yes, there's more, but you'll just have to wait. Or maybe you can invent your own. I'm sure they'll be accurate.]

Social media were burning up Wednesday night with questions about how to finally get ahold of the myriad missing (deleted or otherwise) emails of Hillary Clinton, not to mention missives from her pals Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, before the hard drive went to that great recycling center in the sky. Even the location of the server was up for grabs. Was it at the Chappaqua Clinton manse? If so, would there be a sudden fire or flood? Better move fast.

Then word came that, according to one Vinny Troia, CEO of an IT outfit called Night Lion Security that does, among other things, “ethical hacking,” that the server’s IP was showing it was located at a Manhattan office building. Who knew?

Never mind. What we don’t need now is “ethical hacking.” It’s too late for that. The AP may be suing the State Department, but at the rate these things happen, every government hard drive from here to San Diego could be at the bottom of the Mariana Trench before there’s even a deposition taken. We need the real deal. Someone who can get it done now. We need — Guccifer!

As Hillary would say — nothing to do with national security. Ditto for Sid’s other emails to Hill that dealt with such other minor matters as Libya, Benghazi and the Muslim Brotherhood. (Was Huma snooping?)

And speaking of Benghazi, ol’ Gucc probably knows more about the “Benghazi Group” — those other charmers led by Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines that Judicial Watch has discovered were tasked with keeping a lid on the cover-upsky — than even Catherine Herridge at Fox (to whom we Americans owe a huge debt of gratitude, by the way). In fact he apparently has more emails relating to the subject known only to him and guess who…? Yes, the Russians. You were right the first time. You win the reset button.

But relax. As Hillary assured us at her press conference, her emails had nothing to do with national security. They were about yoga lessons. (I hope they weren’t free. That would be a conflict of interest.) I mean the secretary of state is a ceremonial job, right? Look at John Kerry. What does he do? The Iran deal isn’t even a deal, they’re telling us now. It’s a “non-binding” agreement, whatever that is. (I knew with Kerry it would have something to do with skiing… or maybe para-sailing.)

Anyway, I don’t want any of you to get ideas. I’m not intending to Free Guccifer myself. I don’t approve of these radical movements to let out convicted felons. I always opposed Free Mumia. But if any of you want to do it, I’m not stopping you. I’ll even contribute a little to your flight to Romania — maybe for the extra bags you’ll need (for the prison crowbars). And who knows…. free Guccifer and you could get a big haul. As we all know, it’s not just Hillary’s emails that have gone missing.

You know the Hillary email scandal is a big deal when you read a half-dozen pieces in the New York Times on the subject— news analysis and op-ed — and not one of them is giving her a halfway decent review for her press conference at the UN Tuesday. Columnist Frank Bruni is perhaps the most devastating, calling Mrs. Clinton “Mesozoic” — in other words, yesterday’s yesterday’s news.

Things are bad for Hillary and this is before we hear more of Bill and Jeffrey Epstein and Huma’s emails, Saudi donations, missing hard drives and God know’s what else. I think it’s at least possible at this point that not too many weeks down the road Hillary will suddenly develop “health issues” and not run at all.

So who profits by this? The cliché goes that the Dems don’t have much of a bench — and that’s true. In the end Webb or O’Malley may emerge. I don’t see Warren finally running. I don’t think anyone would take “Fauxcahontas” seriously in the swing states and the Democrats know it.

But what of the Republicans? They’re supposed to have this great bench, but I’m not so sure. The Hillary scandal doesn’t help Jeb, only reminding us that he too is a tad Mesozoic, though not as much as Clinton of course. Still, it’s enough already of the past. That doesn’t help Huckabee or Santorum either, or even Christie. But what about the man-of-the-hour Scott Walker? Again, I’m not so sure. He has a lot going for him, but every day it looks as if 2016 is increasingly a foreign policy election. And the Hillary scandal — Benghazi, Iran, etc. — only underlines that further, making the commander-in-chief requirement even more important. I’m not sure Walker fills that role. And Rand is disqualified in a foreign policy election and, to be honest, I don’t think Cruz can win.

So if I were a betting man at this moment — and I’ll probably change my mind, usually do — I’d put my money on Marco Rubio to come to the fore, possibly sooner than we expect. He has that youthful, fresh face feeling as well as genuine foreign policy competence. Off the cuff, he is the best spoken of any of the Republican candidates. I know many on the right rejected him over the immigration issue, but he’s corrected course on that one and now emphasizes border security, as he should. After all, that’s a crucial part of foreign policy right now — protecting our shopping malls from Islamolunatics.

Anyway, feel free to disagree (I know you will) but remember this. If you’re looking for someone perfect, whatever that means to you, that’s not happening, not from the human race anyway. Perhaps someone from Alpha Centauri.

Did Americans suddenly become more racist and sexist after 2008 or could another factor be at play?

When I grew up, I thought the Democratic Party was the great friend of minorities and women. The party wanted a world of equality, I thought. Most people I knew believed that too.

Sorry, I was an idiot.

Here’s our contemporary world as it actually exists: Ayaan Hirsi Ali — a woman who has had a clitoridectomy and has had literally hundreds of death threats, maybe thousands, risking her life daily fighting the horrible mistreatment of her sex under Islamic Sharia — has her honorary degree withheld by Brandeis University while Hillary Clinton — the putative Democratic Party nominee (still, I guess) for president — takes multimillion dollar donations from Saudi Arabia, where women aren’t even allowed to drive.

Something is wrong with that picture. Now how about this?

Barack Obama, the first black president, comes into office and black unemployment actually increases while, for the first time in years, relations between the races in our country are reported in a recent poll to be worse by both blacks and whites.

Something’s wrong with that picture too. Did Americans suddenly become more racist or is it something else — that something being the policies of the Democratic Party, encouraging division and then living off those same divisions like a parasitic animal?

The Republican Party is unimpressive, to be sure, but the Democratic Party is indeed an animal feeding on our nation and making it weaker and weaker. The way that party approaches women and blacks is quite remarkably similar — treat them as a unified interest group and then exploit them. How insulting, how deeply reactionary. If I were a woman or a black I would be disgusted. Obviously, not enough are — yet.

When Hillary Clinton tweeted yesterday in the midst of her latest scandal “I want the public to see my email,” did she mean all ten hidden accounts, or just hdr22@clintonmail.com, the only account to be outed before that tweet? Now, thanks to a hacker, who seems not to have done anything illegal but use a piece of software, things have gone, shall we say, a little haywire:

A prominent hacker tells Fox News’ James Rosen that Hillary Clinton appears to have established multiple email addresses for private use.

Aides to the former secretary of state say she only used one private email while in office — hdr22@clintonemail.com. That domain name has been traced to a private Internet server in Clinton’s hometown of Chappaqua, N.Y. The server was registered in the name of Clinton’s former aide Eric Hothem a week before the Obama administration assumed office.

Rosen’s hacker source employed a tool called “The Harvester” to search a number of data sources to look for references to the domain name Clintonemail.com. The source says it appears Clinton established multiple email addresses, including hdr@clintonemail.com, hdr18@clintonemail.com, hdr19@clintonemail.com, hdr20@clintonemail.com, and hrd21@clintonemail.com.

Other email addresses include h.clinton@clintonemail.com, Hillary@clintonemail.com, contact@clintonemail.com, and mau_suit@clintonemail.com.

It’s not clear whether Clinton used any or all of these email addresses. It’s also unclear whether her aides used them.

Fox News reached out to the Clinton team for comment and has not heard back.

I’ll bet. I wonder just who was using mau_suit@clintonmail.com. Was that a special address for their Chinese donors? Badda-bing, badda-boom. Oh, never mind.

Jokes aside, this is rather an impressive array. And a huge amount of digging for Trey Gowdy, Judicial Watch, et al. Might be a smart idea to get the Republican congress to pass new FOIA legislation mandating speedy reaction to subpoenas because the normal stonewalling process could make this take well into the 22nd century, well past the Chelsea administration.

Okay, what’s clear is the American public is being given a test. Are they going to elect Hillary Clinton, a serial liar who purposefully hides her communications from the public and the government she is supposed to be leading while making Foundation deals with Qatar and Algeria in the middle of a war against militant Islam? If they do that, after everything that has been revealed and is going to be revealed, after Benghazi during which this deeply immoral woman was able to tell the father of a man who was just murdered in a now proven jihadi terror attack that “they would get that man who made that video,” we are all screwed. I don’t know what we can do. Head to Texas and help it secede?

But apropos of the incredible paranoia of having not one, but ten hidden email accounts, I have been thinking of Ed Klein’s Blood Feud: The Clintons versus the Obamas, which I read some months ago. It was a pretty lurid account of some pretty lurid people but it strikes me that it might be the key to this email paranoia. Sure, no Clinton wants to be subject to a FOIA request, nowhere, nohow. But they would also want the hated Obamas as far out of their business as possible with the server safely ensconced in Chappaqua, far, far from Valerie Jarrett. (It’s not by accident Obama man David Axelrod cast aspersions on the emails today.) Anyway, we’ll all find out — or we won’t.

And whatever the case, fair’s fair. Bill has his “bimbo eruptions.” Now Hillary has her “email eruptions.”